After belatedly realising rationality wasn’t enough to win, the president needs to heal a ‘fractured’ society’s sense of injustice
On the campaign trail in Denain, one of the poorest towns in France, Emmanuel Macron walked into a crowd of voters to “take the pulse of the nation” and a woman pushed forward to sum up the mood. “We’re living in misery,” she said. Others shouted: “This country doesn’t work” and “We’ve had enough”. When one father described not managing to make ends meet, Macron said: “That’s what I’m fighting for.” The man shot back: “That’s not the impression I have.”
Macron, a young, former banker, who had loosened labour laws and promised the biggest overhaul of the French welfare state since the war, was lauded internationally for making France a “star economic performer” of the pandemic era – growth had bounced back faster than expected from the Covid crisis, unemployment was at its lowest level for more than a decade, and government caps on gas and electricity prices kept French prices from rising as fast as those in European neighbours.
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